Twitter Tweets From Xubuntu

Maybe you’ve heard of Twitter, it’s a social networking and micro-blogging service. The idea behind Twitter is simple. Allow users to send and read what other users have to say in text under 140 characters known as a “tweet”. Users see the tweets of other users they have agreed to “follow”. I have found the service very useful for promotional and personal uses and I’m not alone. In February 2009, Compete.com estimated 55 million visits monthly to Twitter.com with over 6 Million unique visitors per month. Twitter is now considered one of the big three social networking applications ranked right behind mega giants Myspace and Facebook. The simpleness of the Twitter application is, for me, what makes it so nice to use. Tweeting takes only a few seconds of my time and it can be done at so many different short lulls and breaks throughout the day. I use twitter to in a sense document my professional day. This allows for associates, business partners, family and whoever else to keep up with me as i tackle one task after another. This style of communication is a very unique one that grows on you the more you do it. Another reason I’m hooked on Twitter is that it’s so easy to use. I can tweet from my cell phone while I’m waiting in line at lunch or at my desk while I wait for a few files to upload.

This new technology is all about being quick and constant, posting tweets several times a day is very common, some users post 10 – 20 tweets every day. This means that from my Xubuntu desktop I was opening Firefox, waiting for my homepage to load, then navigating to Twitter.com, logging in, typing, and posting my text-based tweet. I was looking for anything I could do to cut down time spent navigating to Twitter. I looked around and found my old buddy Prism. Mozilla’s Prism allows web applications to be launched from the desktop and configured independently from the browser. I was able to find Twitter setup with Prism in the Synaptic Package Manager on my Xubuntu desktop by selecting all available applications and typing twitter.

After downloading and installing the Twitter I was able to immediately navigate to it in the Network part of the Xubuntu menu. After selecting it from the menu Prism was brought up shwoing the Twitter online application. I entered my username and password and pressed the sign in button.

After signing in I had the full functionality of Twitter just as if it was open in my web browser. The service this provided for me was fewer clicks and less time waiting for Firefox to start.